flâneur

Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit | The New Yorker

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The company, which has a hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitoring the streets of the U.S., frames privacy as a worthwhile trade-off for safety and security, echoing the language of the post-9/11 surveillance boom.

Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” Imagine: no more carjackings or kidnappings, murders or robberies, rapes or vandalism. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe,” Langley said, during a TED talk last month. “It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.” Langley, who is thirty-nine, tells the story of creating Flock from the vantage…

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